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Monday, 5 November 2012

Paul Krugman Is A Wanker And Other Stuff On Psychology

When it comes down to it, we are nothing more than a bunch of irrational cavemen. We fall into the same fallacies, the same traps, day in and dayout. The assumptions in neoclassical economics world of the rational consumer is nothing more than obsequious manhandling of dem Samuelson titties. But this does not merely apply to finance. It applies to every spectrum of human thought and any sphere where the now antediluvian epochs can either be enhanced, ameliorated, or learned from. I've always found Newgrange fascinating. How the bloody fuck, without calculus, was stone age man able to figure out the position of the sun in the sky on the 21st of December every year? We mock, ridicule our ancestors, but in actuality, in many ways, they are the sagacious, and we are the puerile little brwats.

So, what are common logical fallacies, and how do they apply to the manophere? First, we have the fact that people tend to be extremely overconfident. There have been thousands of studies done on this. 90 percent of people think they have an above average IQ, how they think their social skills are above average, how professors of all disciplines think they are superior to their cognitively challenged colleagues. But, we are talking demographics here, not individuals. There is an extremely good change you are vastly overrating your abilities in a said field. You are probably one of the mean hangers oners. Second, being overly optimistic. People who end up in marriages believe that the chances of divorce happening to THEM is around 5-10 percent, when in reality it's 40-50 percent. An intelligent way to approach any of the challenges and vicissitudes of life is realise, you are more than likely fluctuating around the mean. That's not to say be limited in what you do, no. Just realise, be cognisant of the fact that you literally aren't remotely special. Newton, Gauss, Rowan Hamiltion were special. You aren't. Third, people are fucking abysmal when it comes to working out probability. Consider this simple test. You have two urns. Urn A contains 3 blue and 7 red balls, and Urn B has the numbers reversed. If you draw, with replacement, 8 red and 4 blue balls, what is the probability that you drew from Urn A?

Is your answer 70 percent?

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It's actually 97 percent.

Here's another bogey for yous. Self-attribution bias. This, is where you attribute successes to personal abilities, failures to unforeseeable circumstances. So, you're in Dublin City Centre and you pull this lassie in Doyles and it's like, I'm a fucking sexy beast, when in actuality you're a maladroit, stumbling twat who only went there because the wee lassie was paid by her crutch tae do so. You fail, and it was because it was her doing, or the fact that she isn't twis not yours. Boo fucking hoo. Hindsight bias is another big one. It is basically where you say to yourself, yeah "in hindsight" it should have gone like this and like that and like this en ut. But in actuality, you just got lucky, or your view of the past is heavily heavily distorted.

But the most egregious of this, potentially, has to be belief perseverance. This, I would wager, is one of the most fatal flaws in humankind's genetic makeup. It is the reason why doctors recommend you wolf down that whole grainy cereal despite the plethora of evidence, and it is the reason Paul Krugman gives such horseshit advice which has been repudiated countless numbers of times (oh hi Eastern Europe!). Belief perseverance is simply put, believing the wrong things for too long a time, and, when you go looking for objective unequivocal proof, you look for proof to fit and clarify your own model and your own world view. Again, back to our good friend Mr "conscious of a liberal" Krugman. The highly abtruse neoclassical models he uses? Lol. They don't have dat credit in dem. Huh, good show old chap. So what about all that Basle 2 and securitization shit that was supposed to reduce fundamental risk doon, you wally? And a brief digression, to the atheistkult who pratters on about this. Religion slowing down science? Try the proven again and again fact that people will hang onto their own beliefs with the mightiest of grasps, despite how timorous they might or might not be. Fuckbats.

Our brains are not designed to take on this brave new world. Game is the entrypoint, using your eyes for the first time. It is where the epiphany occurs, that your beliefs might well be wrong, might have always been wrong, that there is only so much out there, that you my dear friends, are not really that smart after all...